


and run to the light

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 22:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12492280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: The Shirogane shrine takes in a stray for the winter.





	and run to the light

**Author's Note:**

> a belated happy birthday to one half of the ship that ruined my fannish life.

_In the deepest hollow of the mountains, a village still sits on the border between two provinces._

_How old is the village? Older than the earliest stories that your grandparents can remember. Older than heartbreak. Its stone-arched gates were there before farmers started to bury earthenware packed with cabbage and dried red chilis soaked in rice wine. Even the ghosts that have forgotten their own names remember the village's plain-brick houses, which had been squatting between the boulders and the grey wood since they were children._

_One of those answers is a lie, but only one. History has a way of getting lost in the mountains._

 

# *

 

Shiro wakes out of a storm.

The dream of mist's still clinging to his tongue; it goes tumbling with his sigh. Rain echoes in his ears where the dream of it had drummed the wide slats of the shrine veranda, where it roared off through the stout cedar railing in a hundred little waterfalls. It'd been a bright snake of a storm, coiling the world like an undertow, winds whipping and racing each other in a dream fit to drown mountains.

But the air's white and dry and still, bitter as wormwood in his lungs. Only thunder rolls through the rafters in an endless sulky murmur. Frost has laced white along the ceramic display, scraping cold along nerves and sills. If he breathes, he might taste mustiness beneath the ice: woodrot, from the snowmelt beading and trickling in a corner where the cypress window-frame hadn't been sealed right. The problem with winters after growing up, Shiro thinks: chillblains, walkways to shovel, and constant house repairs. 

He's been letting himself dream too long. Cold's chipped the gold and red off the rooftiles, cracked their clay, slid splinters into the roof's curving gutters by the fistful. Once, fixing the shrine would have been a ritual honor, conferred by woodworking masters upon selected apprentices at the start of every season. Now, even the little crows who go hopping across the roof in the mornings could tumble through the rafters with a kick. He'll have to think of a signal for the next visitor, and hope they carry his message forward. Light a candle behind the ebony grille of the alcove for prayers, maybe. Cast a spark through the eyes of the solitary lion who sits at the foot of the rotting steps. Twist the colors in the lantern-flame set by the shrine's pillared gate and leave it to burn blue, red, blue for a day.

The rafters jolt again, and he stills.

_The lantern._

It isn't thunder that's shaking the shrine.

Out he goes, sliding back the black-barred door, picking his way down stairs worn glossy and pale as heartwood. Winter's run a crackling film of ice over the earth. Down the little path, a shadow's kicking at the stone lantern. Glass shrieks above the night, splinters and pebbles rattling: a fist's smashed the pane.

"What're you doing?"

The boy bolts back, nearly tripping over a dislodged rock. He straightens at once, fists wrenching stiff at his sides. "Who are _you_?" he demands. His echo rings out like an owl's: _who-who-who?_ "Get out here—get _away_. No one's supposed to be here!"

" _You_ came out here." Shiro crosses the dust without sound, watching the boy sway out of reach at the edge of the skeletal, clawing trees. He'd taken out more of the lantern's standing stones than it seemed from the steps: stones lie scattered in chunks across the landing. "Did you hurt yourself?"

"Don't come any closer. If you do—"

"I'm not going to hurt you." Even in the dark, the boy has a thin face: bones sketching hollows beneath his paper skin, eyes set like coal. With care, Shiro lifts one empty hand. "Look—we're the only ones up here right now. All right? I just want to take a look at you. Can you come back over here?"

The boy stares—but he stalks over in the end. He's wrapped a too-big poncho over himself, pinching it close. The wind whips it to flare like a crow's scrawny wings. Shiro watches his footprints: one sharp, one dragging smudge. He's limping. Human, then.

He beckons the boy back to the shrine's landing, where two ironwrought lamps have struck themselves alight. Sullen, the boy strips off his ragged shoe and props up his ankle on the topmost stair. Shiro peers down; he studies the jut of bone, the creases that ring his ankle, the sharp blue vein. "Well, I don't see bruising," he says. "How long have you been limping like that?"

Ice-lipped, the boy turns his head. His profile burns, caught between the pearling and gold of night clashing against the lamps.

His mouth crooks. "Hey," Shiro says. "Didn't sprain your lungs too, did you?"

The fuming silence deepens—but a little snarl spirals across the veranda, gurgling and grumbling, shaking the shrine to its rafters. 

The boy's hand jumps to his belly. He stares at his body in outrage while Shiro bites down the rest of his smile. "If you're a hungry ghost," the boy growls, even sulkier than his stomach. "Just eat me and get it over with."

He's drying quick. A cowlick's already prickling up at the back of his head—but it wouldn't do any good to reach out. Shiro knots his fingers against a restless, thoughtful twitch. "You're kind of bony to make a good meal. I don't know if my teeth are strong enough, and I'm a little too tired to unhinge my jaws tonight. That's a joke," he adds, under the boy's dark-eyed glower. "I'm not going to eat you. Just sit for a second—I need to grab something."

He gets to his feet. Through the open door, a rag's swaying on the bar before the alcove. It hadn't always been a rag—he spares a brief apology for its age-splotched cloth and its spiderwebbing ink as he unfurls it under the roof's ice-fanged edge. A shiver runs through the icicles; tooth by tooth, they drop into the swoop of his outstretched wrap. He wraps the ice and knots it twice before he trails back. A chill beats through the snowy skin like a pulse as he presses the pack to the ankle. Shiro counts them off: _one, two, three—three for good luck, three for a better day._ The boy's shoulders slip and slacken; he closes a hand around the pack, and his jaw unclenches.

"This isn't the best night for a walk," Shiro says, watching him. "What brought you out here?"

The boy looks away. A lie tics black beneath the flex of his throat, but it unravels before it lands on his tongue. "I was in Mosukane. They told me I could earn dinner for a week if I just came up here. All I had to do was cut left twice on the mountain path until I found the lantern. They'd give me the food once I kicked it down and brought back some of the broken glass."

"Mosukane," Shiro says. "That's almost two hours away."

"I can _do_ math."

"I just mean that—four hours is a long way to walk for one week's worth of meals. Especially tonight. Didn't you see the clouds?"

The boy hunches up. "I don't have any money," he says.

Under the gauzy lamplight, he looks less like a crow than a little cat, all prickling hackles and the promise of claws. Shiro's staring again—he has to stop. "Well," he says, "you're not going to make it back down the mountain like this tonight."

"The snow was already here when I started walking. I'll be fine."

"Look," Shiro says, and the boy freezes, stark-eyed. "If you just want food, I can get it for you. Just sit with me from now until morning. Please—will you do that?"

The boy's grip tightens on the ice pack; his palm flexes against the step, stiff with thought. "Tell me your name."

"What?"

"A hungry ghost doesn't remember its true name," the boy says. "That's why people carve their family names on plaques outside their doors—so that a hungry ghost'll know that it doesn't belong there, and won't go in. If you can tell me your name, I'll stay."

Even a hundred years ago, the traveling priests would have boxed his ears to hear this garbling of the hungry ghost's legend. Fortunesellers would have laughed and thronged him with luck charms, made him work for three seasons to pay them back. 

But the joke sticks in his throat in a half-piece, clumping like sand. He can't tell the story anymore. He doesn't remember enough to say anything.

"Shirogane Takashi," he says, at last.

The boy nods once, and allows himself to be guided inside the warmer walls of the shrine. On the landing, Shiro strikes a light behind the brazier's groaning cage. By the time its latch clanks into place, the boy's already tumbled into sleep headlong, his arms braced along the flat borders, black brows still furrowed as if he'd chase off even his dreams.

He keeps staring, Shiro realises: watching as if for something nameless and long-lost. It won't do any good. This kind of night isn't a hope to press into prayers, something he can hold onto. Still he takes his place at a midpoint between the boy and the door; he sits cross-legged and doesn't turn away even after those pain-hooked breaths unravel into a drowsing, stormless calm.

 

# *

 

_Life clings uneasily to rock. The dirt ran sour around the village. The clouds knitted flax-thin brows over its three dust-lashed streets, or else clustered into black and pounding storms. At fourteen, the village's brightest daughters and sons would cram their luck charms and their best boots into burlap sacks and make for the towns during the apprenticing seasons. For centuries, its people lived by a collection of delicate trades. Girls wandered the mountain path in the evenings, telling stories and fortunes. Old men took the fine silks brought up to their stations by merchant housestaff and scrubbed them in the highest streams where the snow began to trickle. Even the smallest children were taught to paint porcelain, dabbing and pinching along the bone-pale rims in the mountain's famous petal-cluster patterns._

_The villagers had three points of pride: first, they owed no debts to outsiders. Second, their village, alone of those on the mountain, could coax and tend oleander trees to flower in the dry soil of their territory. Two rows of oleander caged the path which snaked from the village to the foot of the mountain. In summer, each of these would flower open to petals long as a man's fingers. The red oleander trees, in full bloom, could have charred a sunset; the white glimmered and lit the way like lanterns, beckoning always to some idling breeze._

_The third and greatest of their accomplishments was this: only the village families knew the safeguards against the grey wood. Its trees draped and overran the mountain slopes like mist, clouding streams and sapping the earth; at night, its spindling branches clawed the well-walked paths to ribbons, luring travelers out to the dark. In the lower lands, the priests burned incense and planted stone dogs as guardians around their fieldstone walls; the towns wreathed themselves in steelwork and the religion of rationalisation. Neither would have had half the effect, the families told each other, if the village had not planted oleander all along the points where the mountain paths came into sight of the grey wood. No overboiled science would have shielded the province if not for the fortunes that the villagers sifted from the constellations._

_And so, season by season, the village girls, with their luck-red gloves, cast sticks and read these patterns to lay out the province's almanac. The wise men grumbled purifications as they scrubbed sashes and socks. Husbands painted_ strength _and_ peace _on clay and sent their work to the potteryboys for glazing; wives coaxed wild clippings to furl green in new pots. In so doing, the village protected the lands below._

_But stories don't grow out of good fortune._

 

# *

 

"Morning."

The boy jolts up. Rags go tumbling everywhere, reeking of lantern oil and ink. A knife flashes between his hands.

Shiro steps back. "It's just me," he says, and lifts a bowl cupped in one palm. Steaming rice wafts through the incense-sweetened air. They'd offered up salted mackerel today too; it gleams silver and salt-reddened along the bowl's stone curve. "I brought breakfast—"

But the boy's already shoved his knife back into his sash. He seizes the bowl. Shiro drops to a seat, tugging at the folds of his own black robes as the boy settles in to inhale his breakfast. Morning's brought a new wind to the shrine; it grumbles along the walls like a forlorn lover, flinging powdery slaps of snow at the shutters. But the offering's done its work: he's told the cold to stay _out_ today, and the shrine's single chamber beats warm, warm as coals can make a winter, even as handfuls of ice go scudding by the threshold.

"Sorry about last night," he adds, after the boy's finished confirming to himself that he can't swallow the bowl too. "I leave the leftovers out for the crows during the day—usually everything's gone by sunset. How're you feeling?"

"Fine," the boy says. A glance flickers once around the boxy chamber, tracing its single door, the ice melting on the threshold's line; but he only snaps his teeth together again.

"Are you still hungry?" Shiro says. "That was a long night, and it got pretty cold. They left some pickled radish too, if you've still got room in there."

The boy pushes the bowl away, hard and deliberate: it scrapes a hollow note along the wood. "If I keep eating," he says, with a black look, "there's not going to be anything left for you."

"I think you're forgetting that I woke up before you," Shiro says. He's already crossed back to the shrine's door to pick up the tray. "It's all right. It's safe."

The boy lifts his head in a sharp stroke. He takes the tray as Shiro offers it, grip stuttering as each grasps hold. Shiro pulls away before they brush.

He eats slowly at first, his fingers thick and fumbling on the raggedy chopsticks, but his bites come quicker as he works his way across the tray. He chugs the fat-bellied flask of springwater like a boy competing against drowners. He wolfs down the little jar of pickled radish, the rosy sliver of salmon glazed with rice wine, the bowl of chopped cabbage and beansprouts, gleaming with sesame oil and studded black peppercorns. 

When the tray's laid bare, the boy sets it down, pushes a knuckle against his mouth—and whitens.

"I should've warned you," Shiro says at once, rueful. "But it's been a long time since I've had to think about it. Are you going to be sick? I can see if I can find a way to get them to bring up another platter—"

Already the boy's knotted into himself: his rake-thin arms circling his legs, chin jutting against his knees as if sheer force of will could lock his meal inside. "No," he grits. "I'm not going to waste food. I'll be okay. Just—"

"You just," Shiro says, when he doesn't finish, "need a distraction. Try not to think about it." But there the words stop on his tongue, quick as sake to dry. He's been alone for too long; there's only so many that his dusty memory will hold now. Slowly, Shiro says, "I could tell you a story."

Maybe the boy hears him, or maybe he's already caught in an unholy digestive battle. He nods all the same.

 

# *

 

_In this mountain village, where they tended the oleander trees and read constellations quicker than words, the poorest family had a son._

_His mother wrote down prayers for farmers to hang at shrines; his father dug up rare herbs across the mountain line. But all his scanty family loved this boy, with his broad shoulders, his untidy black forelock, his sidelong smile. The village girls threw fewer rocks at him than most, and taught him to copy out the almanacs they sold, stroke by inkstroke. The priest who wandered the mountain circuit read the star-charts with him, tracing the shift of his fate with every season. All through his colt-legged childhood, the boy ran errands and chased stars along the mountain paths. He learned to sift, to brew, to bury the fermenting jars and map their graves for later harvests. He bandaged up knob-kneed children when they fell; he carved warding tablets and put them at the crossroads each year to lead bad luck astray. The villagers laughed to see him everywhere, always hurtling headlong after the night. They nudged each other as he passed, calling_ there goes our star-eyed boy again! __

 _Year tore into year. The harvests thinned. The rains ran deep along the pooling curves of the mountain paths, and sleet chipped_ begone _into_ play _into every warding stone. Bandits waylaid journeymen for ransom as they traveled home. The village's trickle of customers, which had been slim but steady for as long as the boy could remember, dried away, though he saw the merchants' horses on the roads and their houses still shone with lamps when he delivered parcels in the evenings. Only the village waned, hidden in the mountains where its need could not shame its neighbors._

_The boy saw his home flagging and fading with the seasons. While others of his age went down to the lowlands to be apprenticed, the boy smiled and refused to leave. He clung to home like a vine, cleaning the local well, stopping up leaks in fractured windows for his neighbors, playing with the smith's three children while she mended picks and natas for the gatherers._

_When he was fifteen, he went to the priest who read the fates for the northern parts of the province. Because he was a simple sort of boy, he had a simple request:_ tell me how we can fix this. __

 _The priest knew that he could speak to the boy of grainrot and soil run dry, of war between lords, of the hungers and pleas which might drive them to heavy taxes, of trade rivalries between villages which festered into fury. But such complex answers were for the world below. The mountains taught their children only curses and charms._ A witch lives at the very end of the mountain's grey wood, _he confessed._ Our prayers have guarded the village against all the misfortunes which steam up from the province, but no fate or star can protect us from sorcery. She knows the fortunes of all villages; she has seen the imperial line to its end. If any curse hangs upon us, it must have come from her.

If it comes from her, _the boy said reasonably,_ then she can take it back too. _And he would not be dissuaded._

_Alone, the boy walked to the house at the end of the grey wood. Unflinching, he looked at its cold steel steps, the four twisting pillars which braced up its jutting roof, the violet lights which wavered and flared behind its curse-paper shutters. The door yawned wide before he could knock: darkness spilled out, and across a floor smooth as skin lay a hearth struck with a bone-white fire. A silhouette crouched by its flagstones. Her long robes spilled behind her like a shadow; her claws swiped and raked through ash with a shrill, metallic scraping. Sparks jumped after her trailing sleeves and the knots of her ghost-thin hair with every sway._

__Your family will miss you soon, _said the witch of the grey wood._

 

# *

 

The boy stays. Snowfall's clumping along the cold-blackened branches, pale and heavy as oleander; it sweeps out to dreaming white drifts, deep enough to bury a legion's worth of boys. It's understood: soon, he'll go. But not today.

Not content to box himself up to hibernate, the boy goes prowling. He packs the ashes of each meal around the roots of the shrine's scattered trees. He kicks at the snow which clots and furs the railing until Shiro unearths a broom for him from some long-buried closet. He prunes the little sakaki trees which grow sleek and green around the veranda, and learns the number of steps it takes to wend a perfect square around the main house. Age, Shiro sees too late, has cut through the shrine: blunted its sharp corners, beheaded the ceramic protectors hidden in the eaves, left its boughs overgrown and its roof bristling like a bird's nest with tiles jolted out of place. Whatever beauty it had once caged in gilding and lettered prayers, the shrine's dwindled to something barely more than a collection of matchsticks and thorns.

It doesn't stop Keith.

On a cold-bleached morning, Shiro wakes to shudders of snow and a beating like a one-winged bird. He goes out, and finds Keith straining tip-toed on the magnolia tree closest to the shrine. His face's pearled with sweat; his hands flash red and mottled through the cloudy light, ignoring the bouncing, plaintive creaks of the branch beneath him as he beats the ice off the curving roofbeams with a broom.

"Keith—"

Keith whirls. His eyes snap wide, his ragged shoes scrabble along bark, and a _shout_ burns through Shiro's lungs as the world spins—

"Ow," Keith says, from the tomb-high snowbank beneath the tree. He bolts up, tumbling snowcrumbs and chips of ice from hair and sleeves; his scowl twists deeper with the cold. " _Ugh_."

He's breathing. No broken bones, no splinters piercing deep, nothing but bruises thrumming through his lungs. Shiro hoists himself over the veranda; he drops onto the crust of the snow, crossing the little distance as Keith sticks the broom into the earth hiltfirst. By reflex, Keith reaches out as he does; his fingers close around the space where Shiro's hand had opened up.

Shiro stops. His wrists drop back, swaying, disarmed. "Get inside," he says, and hears his own helplessness burning low as Keith stares at the empty point where their hands had swept through each other. "You have to warm up, Keith. If you stay out here, you're definitely going to catch something—"

"This place," Keith says. "It's you, isn't it? That's why you never eat—why you've been here for so long. You're a god, and I kicked down your shrine."

" _No_."

His echo rings and thunders, shaking the white out of the cold air. 

Shiro breathes out. "From what I've read, gods have a lot more power than I do," he says. "I just—woke up one day, and I knew I belonged here. People from up in the mountains have been coming here to pray for luck, or for other things that they want, for centuries. Most of the time, they can't even see me. These days, the only thing I do's collect the prayer papers they leave in the box and clean up the daily offerings."

With coaxing, Keith picks himself up, rattling the snow from his broom and the folds of his draping robes. They batter up the steps together. "The food's pretty good," says Keith, expert gourmand, grimacing as the cold trickles and seeps through. "This year's been bad across the rest of the province. Your villages're probably doing okay if they can leave you that much on a daily basis."

Shiro slides the screen shut. His fingers smooth along the splotching sketch of a monk sitting in prayer, all arched brows and shining bald crown beneath the black mists of a slavering, three-eyed monster. An apprentice's sketch, scrawled there as a joke—but they must have loved the work all the same. "But not," he says, soft as new snow, "because of me."

"Could you do that? If you wanted to?"

He turns. Keith's already shucked his wet robes and shoes, kicked them into a squelching grey heap in the corner, wrapped himself up. The quilt's slipped off a shoulder as he fiddles with the brazier. "In the old days," Shiro says from the door. "I used to be able to see up and down the road, all the way down to the foot of the mountains. I'd watch over the things that came in, and make them leave if they turned out to be harmful. As you probably noticed," he adds, with a wry sort of twist, "I haven't been doing that for a while now. The power's still there—it's just sleeping. Whatever the reason, it won't respond to me."

In their black cage, the first coals wink and flare. Heat comes puffing through the room; Keith drops back onto the low bar to wait. Light strikes sharp along his jaw, his steady mouth, the dip of his lashes; it traces his shoulder in bare and shining gold, warm enough to feel.

His fingers flex. Shiro looks away.

"When I first woke up," he tells the rafters and shadows, "I used to think about leaving all the time. Finally get away from all this history—the grudges between my village and the others, the things that keep trying to encroach from the flatlands to feed in new territory. I figured all I'd have to do is keep using my own power until my anchor burned out."

"Are you going to?"

It's a question that contains its own answer—no one who thinks in such straight lines and duties would walk to his own end of his own free will. _It's not that simple_ curls on his tongue—but Shiro only breathes, holding the words until they flicker, bitter as live coals. 

"To be honest with you," he says, "I've never heard of any guardian lasting this long. If I left the shrine—there's no guarantee that there'd be anything left of me once I stepped outside the border. Not even a hungry ghost."

He lifts his head. Keith's dark eyes have fixed on him like a compass rose, spinning the possibility of changes all around him—that he might shift, might change, might disappear. "Well, you still haven't eaten anyone," he says. "That's a good sign."

A smile flicks at the edges of his lips, a slow dawning curl. "I told you," Shiro says. "You're even bonier than the shrine. I'm old. I can't chew that much. And besides, I can think of one good thing that staying here gets me. Especially now."

"Yeah?"

Shiro cocks his head. "Well," he says, "I'm looking at him."

There's a wet sock in Keith's hand. He considers it, dark brows snapping, and fires. Shiro ducks. The balled sock slaps the screen and tumbles away, wafting with it the reek of damp feet. "Maybe it isn't about you," Keith says.

"What?"

"Someone sent me to knock down your lamp." Keith's hunched up again, wrists grinding against his knotted arms. "And it definitely wasn't the first time. The heads didn't drop off your statues by accident. And someone stole the bells off your gate and left paper dolls hanging there instead. Something's been attacking your shrine for a long time. If you're tied to the place, maybe it's been hurting you too."

"Maybe," Shiro says. "But it might just be the villages."

"What do you mean, _just the villages_." 

"Rivalries build up between local villages. If you don't leave the mountains by the time you're fifteen, most of the time, you never will. People have to use up all that energy somehow. At the foot of the mountains, there's a family that's still angry that their favorite daughter ran away with a tradesman from our village. That was," he flicks back through the endless seasons, "about two hundred and eighty years ago. Even now, their kids like to collect curse-papers and boxes with dead rats and send them up. I've taken prayers for purification of any curses laid on the mail. Once, the village below tried to bring in trade from the towns by building a hot springs house. But the fortunesellers in the mountains read the stars, and saw it'd bring misfortune to the region if they built it that year. But they couldn't get the merchants funding the hot springs to listen to them. So workers from the mountain village found the vein where the hot water ran down, and they stopped it."

Keith stops, elbows still bristling, to stare. "You remember all of that," he says, "but you don't remember what the villages're named."

An ache wraps and clutches his throat, clinging as he swallows. He could ask, and Keith would tell him—but the memory wouldn't hold for long. Year by year, he'd read every family record that they stowed in his temple, all the star-charts and kept fortunes until the priests began to forget. He'd known the names of all those who knelt in his little ceremonial hall, once; he dreamt their faces in waves until time came to tear them loose by tides. It's a paradox of memory and loss: that they can eat their fill of each other and still leave nothing but ashes.

"I told you," Shiro says, low. "I've been dreaming for a pretty long time. It's just the way things are."

Keith's gaze holds, steady as the winter day. But he bows his head in the end, sweeping a glance over all his scattered debris: socks and plates and coaldust, the shutters gleaming like lacquer in the coal-light. "Give me another ten minutes," he says. "We still have to burn the fishbones today. You can tell me another story while we're waiting."

 

# *

 

 _The boy looked at the witch in silence. He had not thought of what he would say to the creature who had cursed his village or his land. Seeing her, he knew that words alone would win him nothing from her lamp-yellow eyes or her slow, gnashing smile._ Please, lady witch _, he said instead._ I'm here to buy something from you. __

 __I do not sell, _the witch said._ I make and I remake. You have brought me nothing but yourself. Would you have me make something new of you? __

 _It was an easier answer than he'd have guessed—but it's always easy to give away what you've never thought you could miss._ Yes, _the boy said._

 __And what would you become? Should I hollow out your veins and send you walking across the land to leech away the strength of those who intend harm to your village? Should I bind your soul to paper, leave you to frighten misfortune from the mountain roads with all the monsters you can fold? __

 __Anything, _the boy said, to the ashes and the shadows._ Anything—as long as I can keep them all safe. __

 _The witch reached into the fire. Bubbles raced and swelled down her knuckles, her silvery wrist; they burst one after another, red then black, drip-drip-drying clear. Out of the white hearth, she drew a sword. Its hilt shone black; its blade flared along every line, here yellow as new fat, there blue as veins, there red as skeins of raw muscle._ There is a way to save your village, _the witch told the boy under the blade's shining._ But salvation does not come without price, my star-eyed boy. What will you give me? __

 __My mother writes prayers for the people who can't, _the boy said._ My father sells flowers to the apothecaries. We don't have anything that a witch would want. The only thing I could afford to bring to you was my own two hands. __

 __Ah, _the witch said. She reached out. A claw lashed down his sleeve like a skipping needle: down, down, down until the cloth swayed open and the turn of his wrist glistened beneath the fire._ As this is everything you have to offer, then this is all that I will take. Do we have an agreement? __

 _The boy understood. He peeled back the sleeve, crooked out his arm like an offer—but the witch only laughed her wracking, dusky laugh._ I never promised that it would be quick for you, _she said._

_Like a dog, he followed her into the next chamber: a round little cave circled with torches around a steel throne, where each breath burned into milky steam. The boy sat where she put him; he laid each hand along the throne's skeletal arms, and she wrapped his throat in a silver chain to hold him still. By nightfall, his flesh had chilled to ice: just hard enough for her to cut._

_For four days and four nights, the boy held his place on her wintry throne. Day by day, she slid her spells beneath his skin; she sliced into frozen veins, levered his bones out of joint and began to peel them apart. With her fingers locked in his marrows, she whispered the secrets that she had promised him: where prayers went after the priests burned the papers on the holy braziers; the things in a day that no constellation could fix into fate; the price to pay for a guardian who would watch over the village forever._

_On the fifth morning, she loosed him at last. Alone the boy went stumbling out of the grey wood, dragging bootprints down the storm-smeared trail, one sleeve swinging red-stained and hollow behind him like a mourning flag. Woodsmen caught him as he ran into the daylight, and brought him back to the village. His parents gasped and sobbed out for the loss of his arm. Fishermen stomped flat their hooks in grief; the smith's apprentices all threw down their hammers as the whispers flew through the three streets. They surrounded him, swearing to take their husbands to war against whoever had dared to touch their star-eyed boy, crying out name after culprit's name for him to condemn._

__Was it a curseworker, boy? _a woman said, tugging tight the lacings of her officer's uniform._

 __Was it a wild animal? _said a gap-toothed child._

 __Was it someone from the world below? An uprooted spirit lost in the mountains? A goblin? An outcast priest? Is this Heaven's condemnation or a trial from the the ten courts of hell? Is war coming? Can any of us be saved? __

 _The boy stopped them, then._ Yes, _he said, and at last told the village what they must do._

 

# *

 

Winter wears on. Under the bare seasonal light, they carve up the work between them. Shiro digs through the shrine's lacquered strongboxes for leftover offerings: silks, prayer-papers, forgotten books. These Keith uses to swipe down their rain gutters, to stuff the cracks between slats and patch over the gaps in their screens. At night, he sleeps wrapped in all the blankets and sheets that Shiro can find: a sheet of rare, rich wool; sashes left behind; old silks fringed with wear and mothdust.

He watches Keith less now. It doesn't matter. Memory, which wore out against the relentless seas of stories and names, burns bright on this singular boy: the sooty sting of his lashes, his mouth's slack and helpless trust in sleep, the way his cheeks flush with the kind of life that hasn't been seen in the shrine for decades. In his waking hours, Keith prowls the shrine's grounds like a cat staking out territory. Neither coal-light nor candleflame dulls his bladed edge. But he shivers so terribly at night that Shiro can't help himself—he beats the dust from long-lost quilts, wool and cotton and silk alike, and brings them in to drape each onto Keith's hunched-up sleep, one over the next. After a feverish, star-watching evening, he tries to press a palm over Keith's forehead and his tossing wrists for any hint of unnatural heat—but his fingers only slip through.

The shrine protects its own, and only that. When the winter goes, so will the boy. Shiro has no claim on him.

He keeps forgetting that.

The days run together like meltwater through their shared chamber. Keith grows, and keeps growing. His grassblade limbs smooth out into an easy lope. The bruisy hollows lighten beneath his eyes; he learns to lift his chin and stare with those pearling eyes, ruthless as an animal's. His child-small robe tightens with every wash, fraying sleeves, every stride flashing scarred, bony knees beneath the ragged hem. 

In the end, Shiro sifts through the boxes again. He comes back with tunics, shining pearl robes, trousers that sweep wide and red as gowns; he smoothes the long-winged sleeves over each arm before he settles the black tunic over it, and shows Keith how to fasten the girdle. The linen's thin, splotched pale as petals in spots, but warmth clings to the layers more than anything else in the shrine. His wrists glint through the folds as Keith flicks through the records; light glosses his skin, bright and frail as porcelain.

He learns to wake late in the mornings, long after Keith's dressed himself.

There are storm days too. When the snow's swept too deep to tend to the grounds, they lock the screens, draw the shutters, and heap coals onto the brazier to read by the cosy rosy light. Shiro opens old prayer-books, family records, and star-charts; he maps out the stories of old constellations and the people who once followed them. There was a tanner's apprentice in the mountain village who dreamt of beating the constellation of the double-ended hand drum for three nights during his journeyman trials. Convinced that Heaven was speaking to him, the apprentice spent a year making nothing but double-handed drums. These, both his wife and his sister the merchant stolidly refused to sell or even to mention to polite company; the apprentice was thus obliged to spend nine months sulking up and down the province until he had sold all his wares. By the time he returned, his wife had moved into his sister's three-story house at the foot of the mountains and refused to come back.

"Is that supposed to be romantic?" Keith asks at the end, squinting. "What was the point?"

"The point," Shiro says, at his gravest, "is that I keep asking you what we should read next, and you say you don't care. Then I read them out to you and you complain. It's time, Keith. Pick a book for yourself, or live with these romances forever."

Darkly, Keith fishes out the first book with a red binding.

He teaches Keith to read and write the way he was taught himself: sounding out the words lettered across records or an intricate web of stars, then setting him to copy each line, stroke by stroke. Keith studies old gossip, bloodlines, and constellations. He learns the moments to clap in prayer and how to carve a charm. He memorises the ritual lines of the carp-releasing exorcism, and forgets every bit again in a scathing rebuke of its waste of good rice wine. Out of three separate accounts, he stitches together the history behind the solitary square field just to the north of the mountain's base where nobody will ever grow crops again.

As the year goes tumbling to its end, their offering trays change. Salmon shifts into pickled persimmons and salted fish; with every bowl of rice now comes a side of soba noodles which stretches from fat to thin and back again: the clear signs of children practicing for New Year's. On a crisp night, Shiro discovers a gift: some generous parishioner's left a full sake set and one sloshing lacquered flask.

Keith takes it to the brazier's side at once, wrapping his open palms over each chilled curve of the flask to warm it. "When I first showed up," he says, out of nowhere, "you talked about having an _anchor_. Something that was keeping you here. Can those—wear out?"

Shiro presses the doors together, one screen after another, and clasps the lock shut. No one, he's sure, has offered wine in years. "You're asking the wrong person," he says, absent but rueful. "I have a baseline for the amount of power that I can access on a regular basis. It's there no matter how long I sleep, or what happens in the outside world. Anything more that usually depends on the offerings that people make at the shrine. I think it'd help if I had something _whole_ to anchor to—but that hasn't been an issue in a long time."

They lapse into silence. With care, Keith kneels. 

The rite begins: _In accordance with the ceremonial ways, with a bearer solid and sturdy, before human souls, before otherworldly spirits, we call from the present; we call in solemnity; we call in quiet respect—_

The sake opens, soft as sighing; it pours out, with a shining stream, to a lacquered cup inlaid with red strokes. Under gleaming coal-light, Keith's dark head looks no tidier than a crow's wing. His bare feet flicker beneath the unhemmed curves of his flaring trousers; he must've lost a sock again, and ditched the other in a furor to match. But his wrists turn with a new grace, and his frame holds at rest beneath the black robes.

The prayer ends. A lazy white curl threads up from the rim of the cup. Shiro breathes in, tasting cedarsmoke and a sweetness that shivers on the tongue like honey.

"Wow," he says.

Keith's smile flares to match. " _Kanpei_ ," he says, bright and dry, and palms the cup in both hands to sip away the rest.

They make it through three cups before Shiro studies the roses blooming across Keith's cheeks and calls it off. Keith grumbles like thunder under his breath, but stows the set. Grumbling sets him drifting down the shelf again, from the toys that children had left as sacrifices to the record books. "People were still bringing their records to the shrine about a hundred years ago," he says, all flushed and black-browed scowling for the highest shelf. "What changed?"

Shiro watches his toes as they strain in place to hold him up. "People forget a lot of things when they're hungry," he says, loose-boned and lazy. The taste of sake's still clinging to teeth and tongue, dizzy-sweet; he can't help smiling as he chafes a shoulder. "I was drifting in and out for a while—I'm not sure that I _could_ have answered any prayers while I was like that. You can't blame the villages for abandoning what wasn't working."

"You were answering them for centuries," Keith says. "They still bring fresh food down for you every day. Obviously someone knows you're here—so why aren't they doing the rest? Why just the food?"

The room's warm, still. But Keith's fist has knotted pale against the black of his robe; his teeth have snapped sharp, and his hiss grinds and strains the air like a demand, a living prayer of a different kind. If he breathes, Shiro thinks. If he lets question string into question, taking the shape of a call. If he gave into the voice of a boy wearing the sash and ceremonial black robes, the air wouldn't taste of dust or coalsmoke or ice so much as—

"It doesn't matter, Keith," he says, softer than snowfall. Nothing holy between them now: only Keith's fleeting human warmth. "You remember me right now."

"That's it," Keith says, all slow, soured disbelief. "That's all you want?"

Shiro's smile brightens. "Yeah," he says, just that easy. "It's more than enough."

 

# *

 

_He argued with them into the dark, until dawn: his mother, his father, all the neighbors who had picked him up from the dust, the almanac girls, the priest who had raised him on stars. History's forgotten why they yielded in the end: not out of hunger or greed or fear, for he was a child of the village, and their love for him was no less than the burdens they would bear to keep him. Maybe they knew that, just as swords were forged for war and stars struck across the sky to witness the fates of men, the boy had been made for a duty he must fulfill. Maybe they were too faithful, and knew that a star-eyed boy's prayers were better than none at all. Maybe they understood that no word of love could bar a choice that had been sealed nine days ago, when the boy had turned to the wood._

__The price of all protection is sacrifice, _the witch had said._ Giving yourself up of your own free will makes it a holy thing, and I can make your sacrifice last for as long as your will can hold. __

 _On his instructions, they went to the very outskirts of the village lands. At the point where the last of the oleander trees stopped, the boy turned._ Here, _he said, looking to the foot of the mountain. The villagers searched the slopes in flocks: one by one, they returned with stones from riverbeds and caverns, from overgrown paths and autumn-bared clearings. These they piled around him in handfuls, all their collected pebbles and rocks and broken bricks. As day waned into dusk, their gathering began to rise, forming a ring, a circling wall, a cairn just wide enough to cage a single body._

 __Everything that reaches the village, _the boy said,_ has to travel by this road. That means that the only way we can be safe's if someone's always watching it. A human guard could fall asleep and let something slip by; a spirit would never understand what could harm the village. For as long as memory's burned, we've never owed anything to the outside world. The only thing that can protect us is one of our own. __

 _He spoke and spoke as they packed the stones tight around his legs, his hips, his arm. Children slipped sour-sweet candy preserves onto his tongue as the villagers worked. The almanac girls guarded the road while he stole his last scraps of sleep. When the stones had piled up to his shoulders, grandfathers came and cried until their cheeks cracked and their beards clotted with salt; they laid their pebbles like pearls at either side of his head, kissed his forehead for all the prayers they could not say._ Thank you, _each villager told him through the hollow slot between the stones: face after face that he had learned and loved._ Thank you for watching over us. __

_With steady hands, they slid the last stone into the crack, and sealed it into place._

_Awake, the boy dreamt. The land beat in his marrows. Its roads were his veins, its trees prickled along his skin like his own black hair; its very stones tumbled and shook with his every breath. In the dust he waited and watched._

_He would not sleep again for ten years. Only when they settled a lantern on his watchpoint, when they drew up the first wooden bones of a shrine behind him, would he begin to understand what he had made of himself._

 

# *

 

On the first day of spring, Shiro wakes to magnolia blossoms and an empty shrine.

"Oh," he says.

The sun surges through the same bright arc. Daylight's unraveling the snow to slush, weaving its glassy roots into the earth like the ghosts of flowers. He stacks Keith's scattering of books and practice papers; he toes the nest of wool and abused silks into the corner by the brazier. He walks to and fro: along the shelves and the veranda, down the glinting, petal-sweet path and back again. The oleander branches bow and tangle in black-knotted waves. Past the red iron gates, the shrine boundary beats like a pulse.

If he swallows. If he grinds his fists tight, he might taste the echo of sake, a boy's shadowy warmth when he crimped the quilt over his shoulders, the breathy way he'd grumble _Shiro_ in the mornings—

"No," Shiro tells the path. He turns away.

It was enough.

 

# *

 

He doesn't sleep.

In the mornings, Shiro picks the prayer-papers from the alcoves; at dusk, he takes the tray to the burner behind the shrine, and chars the remains to ash and needling bone. Night after night, he stands on the veranda, watches the magnolia's few bite-pocked leaves falter and go spinning off their stems. The blankets gather dust like snow; the books hold their towers and papered moats where they'd left them to go star-watching from the iron gates. The scent of jarred fruit winds under the flowering air, and he aches with it. 

Every color and call and flickering taste's a thread to tug him back. It's almost worse that half his aching associations don't even make sense. Keith had slept on star-maps until they creased, heedless of their age. He'd once dumped an inkpot into a bush and claimed, dead-eyed, that they'd run dry after Shiro set him to distinguish his calligraphy for _self_ from _snake_. He only ate pickled persimmons after he'd finished the rest of the tray, and only then if the crows wouldn't take them. He would have hated blossoms and studying poetry in spring—would've greeted haiku with scowls and sneezed pollen into his rice.

But thunder shakes the path, and Shiro's on his feet before the thought's struck through his nerves. There's one horse, its frantic lope pounding down to his marrows—then two, then eight, all strung after the first desperate rider as he clutches grimly at bridle and throat, his black robes flapping like a crow's wings.

He's at the gate just as a boy half-tumbles from his horse and comes bounding up the stone steps. "Keith," he says, and crushes down the impact of naked relief. "You were _gone_."

"I had an idea," Keith pants. There's a box tucked into his elbow, slender as a shooting bow's compartment, lacquered and shining beneath its silk veil. "I didn't think it'd take that long. Forget it. I'm here now."

"You could've at least left a note," Shiro starts, and stops at Keith's stark-eyed stare. 

_Oh._

"Where," he starts again. "Where'd you get the horse—"

"Forget the horse! None of that matters. I figured it out." Keith reaches out. A hand crushes tight over his arm, and Shiro spares a single bright heartbeat to be stung before the impact comes shivering through. "Shiro—I need you to focus on me."

 _Shiro_. Breathing, whole and well. Hands dripping sunlight through cloth. _I think it'd help if I had something whole to anchor to,_ he'd said once, and here they stand at last: a bristling, hard-eyed boy with trouble clinging to his shadow and a box whose pulse he's never lost. "Keith," Shiro says, and it spills out of him, shaking. "Are you—"

"I'm sure," Keith bites out. "I belong here too, Shiro—I'll be here for as long as you need me. But first, you have to believe that I'm staying. _Focus_."

Shiro reaches up, wrapping a warm hand over Keith's knuckles. He focuses.

The rest of the riders rattle and pound to a halt beneath the stone steps. A splotched mare noses and weaves her way to the front; her rider lifts his head beneath the tall-brimmed hat of a village headman. "Make way, make way!" he shouts, but his voice runs thin, quaking like his silver bridle. "We're after a thief who stole a famous Mosukane relic! You've got no right to—"

"It's not _your_ relic," Keith says. "It never was."

He strips the silk, slings it away in a crumpled flutter. The box snaps open, latch by latch. Inside, drowsy on velvet lining, stretches a length of age-yellowed bone long as a violin's bow, with five fingers settled apart in delicate sequence.

_Giving yourself up of your own free will makes it a holy thing, and I can make your sacrifice last for as long as your will can hold._

Around them the shadows are swaying. The lantern grumbles like iron unsettling itself; its stones shift in place, stirring dust. "For as long as it's been around," Keith says, "Mosukane's been at war with Hakkin. Some of the records say it's because the headman's daughter ran away with a tradesman from Mosukane. Others wrote down the stories people used to tell. They'd say it was because Mosukane cheaped out on an exorcism a thousand years ago. They'd say it was because the villages were founded by two brothers who never got over some kind of childhood rivalry. Do you even understand how stupid that is? You started trade wars over people whose names you probably don't even remember! For centuries, you'd go to a witch in the woods and buy _curses_ to knock the other village down. Then, eight hundred years ago, Shirogane Takashi gave up his life to become the guardian of Hakkin. All of a sudden, the curses wouldn't work anymore. Whenever bad luck came to the province, it'd hit Mosukane but not Hakkin. So you had to find a way to get around his protections, if you were going to keep competing against them."

The headman sputters through an incredulous string, frothing from denial to outrage as his hat bobs and bounces. "What you're accusing us of," he snaps at last, "first, it's no crime, is it? That's something for our ancestors to sort out in Heaven. Second, we'd have to have plotted it for hundreds of years!"

"That's not what I said."

 _It's just the villages_ , he'd told Keith. _Rivalries build up._ Over centuries, over generations, they'd passed this grudge along like an heirloom: steeped it in petty furies, watered its dark roots with gossip and glancing incidents until it grew into something big enough to drain a village's strength.

"The two of you keep hurting each other," Keith says. "That doesn't take planning. It's like you think the one left standing wins some kind of _game_. The only things you really needed were memory and an excuse. I don't know how you did it, but a hundred years ago, one of you figured out that Shirogane Takashi wasn't whole when he was buried and turned into a guardian. Somehow, you found the arm he lost, and you bound it to Mosukane. So the shrine's spirit stopped answering prayers, and his village started forgetting him. Once that happened, Mosukane and Hakkin were on the same level again. You could go back to sending curses and hating each other for messing everything up, and nobody could get between you."

" _That_ 's why you stole from us?" The headman's lip curls. His fist locks at his hip, but he doesn't shift to dismount. "You're talking about a few silly pranks, you stupid boy. We live in a new age! If Hakkin can't learn to compete in the modern trades, that's its own business. Hardly less than what it deserves after everything it's done, going by the stories. But their losing a valuable artifact's their own problem. Nobody trusts in that curse nonsense now, except children."

"I don't care," Keith grates. "You're not getting this back. And wherever it came from, this war's _over_. Hakkin's going to start helping you out, and Mosukane's going to send them whatever they need. You're not going to fight anymore."

"Aren't we? And who are you, to make such demands?"

_How long can you last, star-eyed boy? How long can you stand alone?_

Keith straightens. His heels root against the earth. Spring's tumbling all around him: the lacy branches of the oleander trees weaving an intricate shield and the flameless lantern glittering with livid new strength at their backs. Shiro presses a hand into his shoulder; but he knows the answer even before Keith lifts his head. 

"I'm no one," Keith says, standing in a priest's ceremonial black robes on the threshold of the Shirogane shrine. "But I'm speaking for the spirit of the shrine."

 

# *

 


End file.
